In yet another infuriating incident out of Democratic legislators, the state of Wisconsin’s leading state senator seized the gavel and went berserk, shouting at and verbally attacking the Republicans in the chamber for allegedly being “cowards” who are fake Christians. The Republican chair remained calm and managed to push back procedurally, insisting that the man’s comments were outside the scope of the discussion.
For reference, the matter came when the state senators were discussing a state-level bill that would block taxpayer funding for illegal alien healthcare, barring the use of public funds for paying for the healthcare for illegal immigrants. The Republican at issue was State Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Oconomowoc), chairman of the Wisconsin Senate’s State and Federal Affairs Committee, and the Democrat was State Senator Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee).
The spat began with State Senator Carpenter referencing President Eisenhower’s mass deportation of illegal aliens, saying, “If you want to go back to the 1950s and look what the Mexican I won’t name the bill where over a million people were deported from the United States. 1000s of them were US citizens, just because they looked Latino.”
Then, after a bit of arguing, Sen. Kapenga tried to get Sen. Carpenter to shut up by banging his gavel on the table, which let to Sen. Carpenter angrily getting up and reaching across the table to try to grab the gavel so that he couldn’t be quieted by it, yelling at Sen. Kapenga as he did so. Sen. Kapenga snatched the gavel back away from him.
That wasn’t all. Also during the hearing, Carpenter shouted that the legislation “a bunch of garbage” and the Republicans in the room were “cowards” who weren’t real Christians. He also yelled, as Kapenga tried to quiet him, “A person is dead. A person is dead. How many more people do we not know about that are being detained, and they’re being treated this way under President Trump?” The situation to which he was referring didn’t happen: the woman he thought had died had not, in fact, died.
And, at another point, Carpenter rambled about the state of President Trump’s deportation effort, insisting that deporting invaders is “unchristian.” He said, “We were told by the president that only the violent criminals were going to be deported… That’s not all that’s happening… so when you’re bringing this up and saying, ‘Hey, look you can’t have any medical care for people that are being detained’ that’s wrong: it’s unchristian, it’s immoral.”
Watch him freak out and try to grab the gavel here:
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Commenting on the incident after the fact, Kapenga explained its importance, saying, as Fox News reported, “I’m not sharing the video because this isn’t about embarrassing individuals. This is about choosing decorum and the use of measured words to persuade those of opposing opinion. Sharing stories with false information to incite fear, name-calling, aggression.”
Continuing, the state senator told the media outlet that America is a bad place, saying, “We all know the dangerous place that’s leading society. The upswell in the movement Charlie Kirk started shows Americans are passionate about the freedom to debate ideas, not rhetoric and violence.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video